Stanford Humanities Lab: 4/22/07 - 4/29/07

 

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The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

SHL believes that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere.

We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation
 
• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property
 
• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes
 
• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

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Trip Report – UCLE 07

SHL's Henrik Bennetsen gave the keynote address at Copenhagen University's UCLE 07 conference, exploring Second Life's potential for teaching and research using the Human and the Machine course from the Introduction to the Humanities program and the Life Squared project as two case studies. The talk was recorded and will be made available on the web at a later date.

Henrik also conducted a workshop, well-attended by representatives from Danish education, research and government sectors. The interest in spaces such as SL is great in Denmark, and it was interesting to note how they were struggling with many of the issues that SHL have faced and solved. So we can hope that our expertise and experience will help to guide them around some of the bumps in the road ahead.

posted by Henrik Bennetsen at 11:49 AM

How and Why Data Disappear

Thursday, May 3, 4:15pm, History Corner, Room 307

The fate of the Royal Library of Alexandria, the incineration of Mayan texts by Fray Diego de Landa, and the mass looting of the Baghdad Museum in modern times all bear witness to the ways in which vast storehouses of knowledge can disappear in the course of single, cataclysmic events. But what about those forms of large-scale loss which take place, not instantaneously, but incrementally and imperceptibly? What about those forms of disappearance which take place, not at the hands of armies or looters, but as the unintentional and unexpected byproducts of everyday life?

Launched with a seed grant from the Stanford Humanities Lab, Project Absentia explores the phenomenon of unintentional loss in its myriad forms. With the assistance of the program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and the Suppes Center, Project Absentia is hosting its inaugural session on Thursday, May 3, at 4:15pm.

The May 3 session will feature presentations by leading scholars in the fields of Information Studies and STS: Christine Borgman, Chair of Information Studies at UCLA, and Geoffrey Bowker, Executive Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University. During this session, we will examine the phenomenon of unintentional, catastrophic data loss, investigating the processes by which vast collections of information can disappear despite concerted efforts to maintain and preserve them.

posted by Jeff Aldrich at 8:00 AM